KEY
Bold:	Interviewer
Regular:	Respondent
[ ]:	Uncertain word(s)

Great, well listen, thanks very much for accepting at very short notice too, just a second and I’ll get the recording going.  It’s okay by you that we’re recording, yeah?
Yeah, that’s fine. 
Okay, yeah so it’s really great to meet you and thanks again for accepting the invitation. 
No problem. 
As I mentioned in the emails when we started out organising this round of interviews, as I think you’ve seen in the invitation, we’re interviewing a number of different stakeholder groups, both in education, but also in entertainment, game developers, researchers, players, also policy makers and so forth.  So yeah, when we’re starting the education round I was very keen to have someone from the [anonymised]talk to us about it.  We consider it a very important initiative in the field, so it’s great that you’re able to spare us the time.  
Right, so what I’ll do, I’ll just do a brief intro for you, just to run you back through the interviews and a brief explanation of how we’re going to work it, and then you can ask any questions you’ve got, you can ask me from there.  But basically, yeah, that’s the idea we’re looking to try to get some idea of different stakeholder groups, a vision of games, games in their specific context of work, in your case education, but also in wider society as well, and also from a personal point of view, so just getting different perspectives on games, gaming and gamification. 
Okay. 
The way we work it is this, we’ve actually, within the project Gaming Horizons, we’ve outlined a couple of very general themes that we’re exploring through the interviews, but also in other areas of analysing different sorts of documents, the literature, the European Union’s policy on games and so forth.  So we’ve identified these general themes, which we’ll sort of work through, through the interview, okay.  So what I’ll do is, I’m going to, I’ve actually got some slides here, which I’ll just throw up right now, just some very basic slides.  Just let me get the screen sharing going here.  Can you see that slide now?
Yeah.
Can you still see my video?
I can see – I’m on my iPad right now, so I can see your screen fine.  
Fine.  So what we’ll do here, I’ll throw up one of these slides with these general themes every so often, through the interview, at a certain point I’ll show you the same slide with a few key words added onto it, and basically these are some of the topics and issues that have come up in the project so far.  So we’ll have a look at those key words and you can see whether you think you’ve mentioned it, or you have something to add on it, or if there’s an area that you’d like to comment on that you see in the key words.  
Okay.  
I’ll just prompt, run you through it as we go.  As far as the interview itself goes, I mean there’s no problems in terms of – I hope an hour or so is okay for you still?
Yes, an hour’s fine.  
There’s no hurry in the sense that it’s not a, by any means a journalistic interview, we will be obviously transcribing the interviews and analysing, but I mean you can take your time, you can reflect and think about what you want to say, you can change what you want to say, you can comment to me or ask questions to me at any time you like, and if you prefer you can even decide not to comment on something, that’s up to you. 
Okay, sure.  
Okay, so that’s about it.  So basically, we can start off the interview proper if you like now, and as you can see it’s ‘games and you’, so we could start perhaps just finding out a little bit about who [anonymised] is, so who you are, if you could introduce yourself and say something about your work, what you do and your experience with games, that’ll be great. 
Yeah, sure, so my name is [anonymised], I am the Manager of Programmes of the [anonymised]; [anonymised] is an educational non-profit that focuses on games and learning and making learning irresistible, so we really influence three general areas; the first is teacher professional development, through a programme called Teacher Quest; the second is school design, which is working with organisations who are interested in and opening up progressive schools, and that can be schools centred around the idea of game-based learning, or learning through play, but it can also be around the idea of just opening, of designing a school that works in the ways that students learn, that students learn best, and I can talk a little bit more about that a little bit later; and then the third area that we work is curriculum development, or curriculum work with organisations that are interesting in writing innovative curriculum, possibly game-based curriculum or project based curriculum, and sort of lending our expertise to that.  
We also do corporate training for innovations that are interested in bringing the principles of game like learning and play into their areas.  
My background is in education, I was a six-twelfth grade social studies teacher for about ten years.  I worked in high schools as a US and world history teacher and a sociology teacher.  I worked, I taught grades nine through twelve in parochial schools and in public schools, and then in 2009 I found about a school called Quest to Learn that was going to be opened up with the New York City Department of Education, and [anonymised]as a founding partner, and that’s how I was introduced to the Institute of Play, so I became a sixth grade social studies and English teacher there.  I came as a teacher in New York City where I, with the [anonymised]I created a curriculum that was centred on the principles of game-based learning and teaching world history and humanities to public school students through games, through role play, through immersive learning experiences.  
I did that for a number of years and I was also an Assistant Principal at Quest to Learn, and about two years ago, two and a half years ago I joined the [anonymised]full time, to work with them on their Teacher Quest programme. 
So your past has been very solidly based in classroom practice. 
Yes. 
With game-based learning and it’s gradually shifted more towards sort of, I suppose management, curriculum, teacher professional development I suppose.
Exactly, yeah.   The bulk of my experience has been as a practitioner, using game-based learning and project based learning and just, you know, and other innovative approaches with students of different ages, but in, you know, in the, sort of the second phase of my career I’ve actually started to move into the direction of working with teachers and working with, we’re working school administrators and school designers and how to think about how do we bring this approach to students, and how do we make this approach workable in our school settings, how do we make it workable in our classrooms, how do we assess this stuff, how do we create it, how do we – and how do you use it in different environments because it’s not a cookie-cutter approach, you have to approach it differently depending on the environment that you’re working with, students are working with, the other stakeholders are working with.  And for administrators, how do you support teachers in doing this, that’s a very important piece to the Institute of Play, it’s a very important piece to me.  
Sure.  
You know, how can you make it realistic, how can you make sure teachers want to do this. 
Can I just – one thing, [anonymised] as a game player, outside of your professional sphere, how do you sum that up?
That’s a really good question.  So I, one thing that I actually really like about the [anonymised]is we are, the bulk of our work is actually centred around analogue games, and around – so it’s actually not in the realm of video games, it’s not as if to say that we don’t video games at all, or we don’t believe it’s useful, but – because we certainly do, we certainly have brought that approach and I certainly have brought video games in different ways to students when I’ve work with them.  But for me as a player I like anything where I am going to really feel like I’m part of that experience.  You know if I get to create and design something, whether I’m doing some sort of a role play game, not like an RPG, but like if I get to kind of create or design a story, or do something that allows me to be expressive and be funny, I really enjoy that.  You know, just – and anything, and I also like things that are simple and classic and elegant, because I think there’s a lot of games that are very brand new and very interesting, but I also like playing chess at home with my wife, I like playing, we like doing crossword puzzles, we like – you know, so really, so for me like I wouldn’t, I definitely wouldn’t classify myself as a gamer, but I definitely, but I really like to kind of look at different games and different areas of play that are useful for students and that are engaging for people.  
Right, okay.  Just one thing, we’re going to – because of the remit of the project we’ll, basically we’ll be concentrating more on the digital level, of digital games or games that incorporate some digital element into them, into the interaction.  We don’t have to limit it, but let’s just say, that’s our primary focus just so you know where we are headed.  
Yeah, and that’s what I figured so I can, so you know, I’m very, I’m happy to speak to you as much about it as I can and I’ll let you know when it doesn’t really kind of fit my area. 
Okay, good.  So I’m just putting up here some of the key words that came up in this ‘games and you’ general theme.  Experiences you’ve told us quite well about your professional experience and some about the impact, so you were mentioning about engaging learners and making, let’s say, a very, yes a full engaging and immersive experience for them.  What about the types, different types of games that you’ve used in educational settings?  
So for different types of games that I use in educational settings, I tend to, like I’ve tended to go in the direction of a game that allows students to experience, to experience and be able to empathise with how somebody lives.  So as a social studies teacher that was very important to me.  If you want to hook kids into learning about social studies you want them to be able to relate to the people and the experiences of the past, you want them to be able to understand and emphasise with what it was like to be a Neolithic settler, to understand how difficult hunting and gathering was, or to understand the complexities of arguing over creating a constitution, or a treaty, or to experience first-hand what a trial was like, or what a murder investigation would be like.  So anything I could do to get students into that experience was going to be very important.  So using principles that, so it could either be actually playing a game and I can talk about a few of those, or it would actually, immersing them in a game-like situation.  
So I’ll talk about games first.  So there’s really three ways to look at bringing games into education, you have the game experience itself, which is actually playing a game with students, or having students play a game with each other and assessing that and getting data from that game.   You have the game-like experience, which is taking the principles that make games games, like learning by doing, learning through play, getting feedback immediately, learning through mistakes, learn through failure, understanding how different things are interconnected, that’s bringing the game-like experience to a classroom.  And then there’s gamification, which is taking the components that make a game a game, and applying it to a classroom setting, like bringing points, badging and levelling up, so that’s the gamification experience.  
So games; I worked, I would do a few things, so for example early on in my career there would be lots of sort of choose your own adventure games that were online.  You know, your organisations like PBS, where I could have students step into the role of being like a civil war general and having to make decisions about a specific battle and working with their classmates to figure out, you know, what they should do in order to win a battle or save as many lives as possible.  So putting students into that situation, then having them think about the complexities of what that would mean.  I saw immediately it was very empowering for students, it gave them a reason to want to know more about a certain time period, or about a certain person.  
But then as I worked with, as I worked in the [anonymised]I was able to think of myself as less a deliverer of content and more of a designer of a learning experience.  So we worked with game designers at Quest to Learn to design games around specific areas of study, so when I wanted to really, when I wanted students to really engage with something that I thought was going to maybe a little drier, or very, very complex but really important, something I didn’t want to just c[anonymised]over, something I wanted to have a deep lasting impact, we would create a game around that experience.  These were analogue games, so feel free to stop me if I go too deep around it.  
So I would, for me as a six grade teacher it was incredibly important that my students understood geography and cartography so that we could learn more about why human beings settle in certain areas and what makes them create civilisations and how geography plays a role in that, and how to read maps for the rest of their middle school experience.  So we designed a game around that experience, we created a game called Galactic Mappers, where students actually took about ninety-minutes in a class period to competitively design, to design continents in teams that would allow them, that would include different land forms and different bodies of water, and as they designed a specific content with their team members they would get different cards that allow them to populate their content with islands and mountains and valleys, and other things like that.  
Then as they did this over the course of the class, the class was, the groups were competing with each other to make like the best continent ever but at the same time they were also building a world and this allowed them to literally, you know, interact with the essential pieces of geography to cut out a peninsular to draw a river in a place that would make sense for a river to be, to create a delta, to see what other students were creating and then step back and look at it and think about where human beings would settle on this.  So this game called Galactic Mappers was a way that I kicked off my six grade school with the students and by actually having to immerse themselves in this map building experience I was also able to assess students’ knowledge of this, I was able to assess how students worked in groups, I was able to assess how students were able to use cartography skills, I was able to assess where students of different levels were at coming into the school year, which ones, you know, knew their map skills and knew their geography skills really well, and which ones needed a little bit extra work.  So the game was not just to give students a need-to-know, just geography in a different content, but it also was able to allow me to assess how they were as learners, and how they were as individuals and how they were as team members.  
We created other games over the course of the year; we did a game-based on the Neolithic Revolution, where it was more they, it was more of an individual competitive game where students were in groups of four or five, where they had to start as a hunter gatherer, and the goal of the game was to develop a city state, so the students had to domesticate their animals, they had to plant food, they had to grow crops, the entire currency for the game was involved, was food.  So any move they made was geared towards helping them produce more food, so if they could settle down in a certain area, grow crops, create a division of labour amongst a society they would, over the course of the game they would level off and be able to develop a village, and then a city and then eventually a city state.  This was a game that I could roll out slowly over the course of a few weeks, as we learnt about the Neolithic Revolution, and then as we learnt about the components of civilisation, as we learnt about the city states.  So it was a game that they could play to sort of practice the different vocabulary and the different concepts, and the different ideas that we were discussing over the course of a certain unit, and by doing this students were really able to hold on to these ideas and experience these ideas, to experience, you know, how difficult it was to be a hunter gatherer.  You know, when you read about this stuff in a text book it kind of makes the work that early human beings had to do very easy, but by actually experiencing that and struggling with them, the students were really able to retain that.  
So those are some examples of games that I would use.  And then a lot of other things that I focused on was game-like, so putting students in a role that allowed them to experience history was very important to me, so mock trials, having students pretend to be certain people in history was very important.  When we learnt about the ancient Greeks students pretended to be spies from ancient Persia, spying on the opinions and spying on the Spartans and going undercover, to find out more about the Spartans and they had to, they had to pretend to be Spartan soldiers and learnt how to march like Spartans and learnt how to be initiated in Spartan culture so that they could report back to the Persian Empire to find out their weaknesses and their strengths, and why they might be a great candidate to be absorbed into the Empire.  So doing this over the course of many weeks, you know, again gave students that desire to want to learn more about something, because that’s what makes games very powerful.  You want to keep playing, there’s a reason you want to learn how to, you want to learn certain strategies, you want to learn certain techniques that makes you want to come back to play again and again and again.  So bringing those principles and leading that into my curriculum was a way to hook students and get them excited about what we were doing. 
It’s interesting, as you’re describing those games I was – it brought to mind other examples of games that, at least sort of tackles similar subjects, similar approaches, civilisations and games like this, digital games that resource management survival and so forth, that sort of hit along those lines, maybe in a different way obviously.  I was wondering if you’d had the chance to sort of compare that experience of them using the sort of game that you created for them with sort of an outside game, say a digital game along similar sort of topics, is that something that you’ve done before?
Only slightly, I mean for me the – there would certainly be, I would definitely have students talk about different games that they would play and how that’d fit.  The difficult thing with bringing a game that’s maybe commercially designed into a classroom is it makes it very difficult to make it fit, to – the level of learning that you have, the technology that you might need, that might be at your disposal at the school, and if you have certain learning objectives, or things that you want to assess, if you design your own game, you can target those areas a little bit better.  So that’s, honestly, I mean that’s frankly the biggest reason that I wouldn’t always go to, like I wouldn’t go to using, to bringing civilisation into my classroom.  Not to say that it’s impossible to do, but you know when I was, when I had thirty kids in the class and I wanted to be able to – you know thirty kids of incredibly mixed abilities and very limited technology capabilities, it was important to me that I could design something that all students were going to be able to experience both in school and at home, and if I was looking to assess a particular idea, or a concept, or a skill, that was going to help me do that.  So it was, so for me, so whatever I’m bringing into a classroom, whether it’s a game or whether it’s a textbook, or whether it’s, you know, any other piece of pedagogy, I’m going to make sure that that is, that it’s going to be usable, it’s going to be realistic and that students are going to be able to interact with it. 
Good.  I think at this point we can move on, I think it moves us on quite nicely to the next general them.  I mean we have been talking about games and learning up until now, but perhaps in this phase we can look at it in perhaps some more detail in some respect, your view of games and learning.  You’ve already told us about your objectives to create and to establish an experience in the classroom where learners are able to experience in a more or less direct way what, the content area that they’re studying in the sense it becomes a hands-on learning experience.  This seemed, correct me if I’m wrong, this seemed to be one of the main thrusts, one of the main objectives you had in pursuing this sort of approach, am I right there?
Yes, yeah absolutely.  So can you just repeat, could you just kind of rephrase that question one more time?
Yeah, but actually it wasn’t a question (laughter).  What I will do is I’ll, let’s – because we have been talking about games, I’ll just throw in now the next slide with the key words for games and learning.  So yeah, I was just summing up saying that you, it seemed to me that one of your main objectives in terms of what you were seeking to achieve through a game-based learning approach was through, let’s say the channel of motivation and also immersion in an engaging experience and that would be a driver of the kids’ learning, am I right in saying that?
Oh yeah.  Yes, absolutely.  So I mentioned this earlier, for me this was a phrase that Katie Salen, who was one of the founders of the [anonymised]and one of the designers behind Quest to Learn, was this idea that games give students a need-to-know, because the biggest question I always had as a student and when I went into education was, I wanted to be able to answer the question, you know, why do we need to learn this, and as a social studies teacher that’s a question you get all the time, why is this important, why do we need to know that; so the easiest way to answer that question, the best way to answer that question is to give students this intrinsic motivation, this desire to want to learn, to want to learn more about it.  You can do this in so many different ways, but what games allow you to do and what experiential learning allows you to do is own that experience, its capture students’ imaginations, and really get them to want to keep coming back to whatever it is they’re learning.  
For me, that was really, that was easier to do as a history teacher because with history, with social studies, you’re telling a story, you’re looking at human behaviour, you’re looking at human interactions and you can build these experiences that allows students to truly immerse themselves, so that was only my goal as a teacher, how can I get, what question can I give students that they should be trying to solve.   You know, what pieces of information do they have to learn, or what skills do they have to learn in order to solve a larger problem or build something complicated, or present something to an audience.  All of these things were centred around empathy and that’s what games do really well, games really give the user, they give the player this extraordinary sense of empathy that you don’t get in other contexts as easily.  So like I said, one thing that really, I would say the driving force of the work at the Institute of Play, and for me as a teacher, was taking the things that make games interesting, innovative and engaging and applying them to an educational context.  
So at the Institute we have seven principles of game-based learning; I can send them to you via email, but a few of them are Learning Feels Like Play, Feedback is Immediate and Ongoing, Challenge is Constance, Failure is Reframed as Iteration, so these are all things that all games have in common.  You know, when you’re playing a game you know if you’re doing well or not well almost immediately; in a game you don’t learn by reading instructions, you can, but you really learn by doing the game.  I don’t know anybody who’s ever taught me a game by just handing me the instructions, you actually have to experience it.  The best games involve many people playing, the best games are always challenging, so if you can bring those ideas and put it in a classroom context, you’re going to have a classroom that has students wanting to work with each other, embracing the idea that failure is actually important, that failure isn’t a road block, failure actually helps you get to a new level, it helps you get to something different, and something great, and for a teacher games allow you to understand how a student is doing in any given moment and it allows the student to understand how they’re doing in any given moment.  
So when we would play a game like Galactic Mappers, if a student didn’t understand the difference between an island and a peninsular they were going to have a very difficult time moving further along in that game and they were going to have to understand the difference then and there, they were going to recognise that they didn’t understand the difference and they would be able to work with other students to help them achieve that, and then by creating, by like physically actually having to create those two things by doing it, they were actually going to understand that, that concept a lot better than just, you know, memorising a couple of flashcards over and over and over again, or in a test, they actually had to do it. 
Indeed.  I was just noticing there, with the keys words you mentioned, apart from a knowledge acquisition, you’ve mentioned a number of skills there in terms of things like problem-solving, communication skills, collaboration skills they seem, the sort of soft skills set if I understand it correctly, seems to be an important target area for your work. 
Yeah, and soft skills we call them twenty-first century skills at Institute of Play, for me as a teacher these were things that were so much more important than contact.  It was important, you know, if I was teaching US history I did want my students to leave class knowing who George Washington was and why the Constitution was important and what the Bill of Rights were, and what the state capital was, all of that was very important to me, but what was more important – but one, I was also realistic, I knew that students weren’t going to remember everything I taught them when they left, but I wanted them to be able to work with each other, I wanted them to be able to think creatively, I wanted them to be able to express their ideas, and I wanted them to have confidence to understand, confidence and the skills to be able to cope with a failure, to cope with getting feedback, and give each other feedback.  All of these soft skills were so important to me, they’ve always been important to me as a teacher, but when I started working with the [anonymised]they actually were able to sort of put those ideas into a language for me to use, which has been incredibly helpful and that’s what we do with teachers, we give them this – we work with a lot of teachers who sort of do this already, or understand this is important but don’t always have the methodology to do this, or don’t have the language to be able to target these things, and that’s what the Teacher Quest [0:34:02] does for teachers. 
You mentioned at the beginning when you were talking about the different experiences that you brought into the classroom, you mentioned bringing in some games with a competitive element in it, and also in terms of bringing game-like and gamified experiences into the classroom.  You can see there with the key words we’ve got both competition and collaboration, how do you see that, those two as a dichotomy or perhaps not as a dichotomy I don’t know, or how they interact with each other in a learning, game-based learning situation?
That’s a really good question, and that’s a question I get all the time, is it, in a learning context is it okay for student to be competitive, and I absolutely think it is, because I think that, you know, a lot of what I pulled from was my own experience in school, so anytime that teachers could make something, something competitive or give us a sense of urgency, I was extrinsically motivated into something and there is, and what [0:35:06] motivation to me as a teacher is the most important thing.  You also can’t ignore that value of, that competitiveness can bring us onto something and how to use it. But it’s matter of using it in a way that’s going to help students learn best, or learn from – to be able to learn from this competition.  
So for example, you know, playing a game like Galactic Mappers or the Neolithic Revolution game and Habitation, there would be clear winners in that game, but the students also knew that in my classroom it was less important to me that you’re winning the game, but that you were learning from it, and I actually would explain to students the difference between that, so for example with inhabitation, students were playing in groups of five around a playing board with game pieces, and a student might always be struggling in the game, not conceptually but like their civilisation might actually be struggling, maybe through the roll of the dice they weren’t able to give as much food as they needed, or another player would invade their village and take all of their stuff; those were things that they couldn’t help, those were experiences in the game that was going to be difficult for them, but if they could explain to me why these things were happening, if they could write meaningfully about it and to explain why those rules were rules in the game-based on what we were learning in history, that was important to me and my students understood that.  
So I had students who might leave class that day having a civilisation that didn’t go anywhere, you know like it was a failed civilisation because they couldn’t, because everybody died or whatever, but the students who could say, man, like I get it, I get why this was so difficult, I understand the struggle that human beings had to go through in order to do that.  That was more important to me and they knew that, and they knew that I had rubrics that assessed their knowledge and their skills, not, did they win the game or did they lose the game. 
And just coming back to the part about the digital element, when there is, or was in these experiences some digital element of some description, did you see, notice any changes or does it change your approach in any way?  Or is that just part of the process?
No, I think – whether I was going to use something digital or analogue, or – you know, same thing with, you know, whether I’m using a game or a lecture, or a book, or having them draw something it all came down to, were students into it, were students able to respond to it.  You can give, you know like if you give students a poorly designed digital learning game or don’t contextualise why that game is important, students are going to see through that very quickly and just because it’s digital or just because it’s a computer game or a video game, if there is no meaning behind it then they’re going to get bored of it very quickly, or it’ll lose its meaning so that was always the number one thing I look for, it’s, is this the best for the job.  So I don’t really know if that totally answers your question but that’s how I look at it as a teacher.
Would you see that – you mentioned that a couple of occasions that perhaps the risk that the digital element or a digital game might not be as engaging, substantial, effective, whatever, do you think that’s a risk that many digital games actually run, by their nature would you say?
It’s a good question.  Not necessarily, not necessarily, one thing we look at with teachers – you know I mentioned that when I started working with [anonymised]I stopped seeing myself as a deliverer of content and more as a designer of learning experiences.  So one thing that designers and especially game designers look at when they’re designing a game is, number one, is it fun; and then number two, you know, that’s the more important thing, whether it’s a learning game or a commercial game or whatever it is; number two, do the, for an educational game especially, do the core mechanics, do the actions of the game relate to the learning goals?  So if you’re making a movement, if a character is running through space, if the character is jumping over something, if you have to type in the answer to a problem, if you have to read something, are those things acting and service of the learning goals.  A lot of learning games that exist don’t do that, you know, you can, you’ll especially see this with a lot of math games or science games, and I’ve definitely seen this with history games, and it’s certainly not something like, you know, something like civilisation is incredibly well done and that you can use more in context in so many different ways.  But there’s other games out there that, you know, it might be like you have to launch a rocket ship and in order to launch the rocket ship you have to solve ten math problems, but that’s just, that’s a fancy worksheet, that’s a fancy worksheet with graphics (laughs) and kids see through that very quickly.  
A game though like Oregon Trail, I would use that with students, I loved playing, you know, even the old 12-bit version, that’s a game where everything you’re doing in that game is helping you emphasise with settlers, it’s helping you – you’re actively having to budget, you’re making life or death decisions, you’re constantly assessing how you’re doing as you’re moving through, as you’re moving along the trail.  You’re constantly having to think about the experience of other people, so that’s a game that I think does a great of making sure that whatever you’re doing as a player is helping you understand the learning goals better; that’s number one for me.  
Good.  Okay, well this bring us, I think, nicely up to the next general theme, which is a bit more general in terms of scoping and application, games and the individual sort of impacts and effects games can have on the individual and I was – just to start us off with this I was interested in one of the first things you mentioned at the beginning of the interview was making learning irresistible, it’s an interesting term, irresistible, because I was thinking also some people don’t, they tend to see games as being irresistible but from a very different sort of perspective, and I wondered what your thoughts might be in terms of impacts on individuals about being irresistible or not.
Hmm, it’s a really good question.  So, well I mean you know generally that, you know, what’s irresistible for one person is going to be irresistible for another person, and different dudes are going to respond to different game experiences, you know, in many different ways.  So that’s one thing to definitely think about and I’ll speak to the teacher practitioner point of view on this and you can let me know if that’s answering your question, but─  So when I would think about designing a piece of curriculum for my classroom and bringing a game into my classroom I would always start with the learning goals and what we needed and what my students needed to know by the end of a unit, or by the end of a week or whatever it was, and I would think about what was going to make this experience great for me students, and I would think about what was going to make it great for the general sort of collective of my students but you also do have to think about students as individuals, so how can a game be modified or changed to meet the individual needs of your students, can you make – so you can do that in many different ways.  You can make a game simpler, you can make a game more complex, you can think about how you’re going to group students together to play that game, because how you group students in playing a game is also going to affect how their individual user experience is going to be, right.  If I group students together who are incredibly competitive and I put one person who doesn’t do as well with that, well that’s going to be a pretty terrible experience for that one student, so that was, so I have to very mindfully group students.  
Then also having students, also bringing student voice into the creation of the game itself was very important to me, so something we started to do was when we were developing a game for a class, we would start to test it with students before introducing it to the classroom and we would ask students very pointedly if they thought the game that we were about to design was going to be fun for the students, how they thought about it, how it might impact their other students, so I would often say, you know, is the game fun, do you think that, you know, is the game too hard, is the game too easy, and I would say, well how do you think this game will go over in the classroom and they’d say, oh you know it might be really good, or I think maybe change this one thing it might be a little bit more fun, I would say, okay, well do you think that everybody’s going to like this game, what about students who get overly excited with certain things, how do you think it’ll be for from, or what about students who get bored very easily, what do you think it’ll be like for them, or what about the students who are very quiet and very shy, do you think they’ll have fun playing the game.  So having student voice in that process was really important to us because it allowed us to make sure that these games were being designed with the user in mind, it wasn’t just, you know, I said earlier, it’s about the learning, but it’s not just about the learning of course, it’s about the students that are playing the game as well, so that was always very important and a lot of times students would give us insight that we never would’ve thought of until we actually watched them play the game and it became a very important part of the process, so whenever we do design a game, or when I had teachers design games on the Teacher Quest programme, we actually bring students in and have them work with students to make this better for students. 
I was wondering how do you feel as an educator, as a person dealing with game-based learning, but a person who experiences games as you said at the beginning at 360 degrees, when you hear those sort of comments that many people make when they, if they think in terms of a game being irresistible they tend to think of things like addiction and somehow being, players being somehow overawed and overpowered in some way by games and the gaming culture, how does that make you feel?
I don’t know, I think for me it’s, everything in moderation, so I look at really through the lens of an educator.  If you can use games in a way that gets students excited about learning and have students remember things that are really important year to year, be able to share experiences in a meaningful way, then I think it’s great.  If it doesn’t do that, if it’s a – if you try to use games as a way to make sure that the class is quiet or just make sure that students like your class but aren’t learning from it, or it sort of masks the other problems that are happening the class.  Like, you know, if I had a classroom of students who are playing, I’ll use Civilisation as an example, if students are playing Civilisation all day, every single day in my class and we were doing this for a month and they’re having a lot of fun, and behaviour’s great and the students look excited, fantastic, but if my students can’t read, if they can’t analyse, if they can’t write well, if they can’t express ideas, if they can’t learn how to work creatively then the game is not doing its job.  
And I think that for any approach, and this does happen with game-based learning, just like any other new approach to learning, you know, this is not totally a new approach to learning, but with any approach to learning that is new and exciting, policy makers, administrators, look at it as a silver bullet and not as just another tool that can be very powerful, but you have to be able to use it responsibly and you have to be able to use it in a way that is really going to benefit students and really serve that greater purpose of bringing in those twenty-first century skills, I mean you’re learning gold standards.  So that’s how I look at it.
I’ve just put up some of those key words that came up here in this theme, so we’re looking at things like engagement and immersion and that addiction aspect that we mentioned.  What about physical activity?
Well, so for me, so I would say that’s actually why I – this is why as a teacher I would tend to go into the direction of analogue games more than digital games, because I do think there’s something valuable in, you know, being able to be tactile, of feeling something, touching something, rearranging something physically with your hands, I think that’s very important and I think that’s a skill that we never want to lose in the classroom, you know, you wouldn’t have – think about the best physical education experiences, because we do game design with physical education teachers all the time, well you know, that’s a setting where you’re definitely going to want to be making games that involve physical activity and not, you know, learning about like – it’s going to be very different then if you play a soccer game or a yoga game or a basketball game online [0:51:31] the same purpose.  
So I think that’s very important.  But again, you know, what is it that you’re looking to do.  I grew up with video games, I grew up playing computer games, but I also, you know, my parents did a great job making sure that it was balanced, making sure that I was also, that I saw value in playing outside and doing sports and all of that, so again it’s part of that balance.  I don’t think that any one thing – I think to label games as harmful because they’re addictive, or because students, you know, kids or adults are kind of stuck playing them all the time and not getting out I think is very, it’s irresponsible to just label it as that.  Anything is harmful if you do it too much, and I think games are a part of that category.  
Okay, thanks.  So let’s move onto the next general theme now, which is games and ethics.  Does anything spring to mind here in terms of ethical questions, issues or matters?
Yeah, I don’t know if this is what you’ve been thinking about when you ask this question, but games are a great space to allow people to debate and experience different outcomes.  So if you want – so giving students for me an opportunity to explore a complex problem or an ethical conundrum, or questions of good and evil, or right and wrong, or decision making, I think creating games that help people answer these questions is very powerful and those are things that I think games can do really well.  So for example – the balance here though is making sure, and we get this a lot as history teachers; history teachers live in this world of answering all of these different ethical questions and all of these human questions and how do we understand this and grapple with these ideas.  Will a game sugar-coat these things or will a game make something seem less powerful than it should be, and I definitely don’t think that’s the case, I think if you can make a playful space or a game-like space that forces students to work with these questions in a way that – I think serious games can do very well.  
I think that’s a great way to address something because it allows people to see and design spaces that tackle with complex problems in a way that you wouldn’t normally get by just watching a film or reading a book, because it allows you to actually experience it in some sort of way; and the important thing for a teacher to do is be able to think about, how do you assess that, how do you unpack that, how do you give students this, the tools to take what they’ve just played and experienced and translate it to talking points and to writing about it more deeply, to sharing their ideas and to bringing their own input, I think when you can do that with a game, or with a role play or with something that is, that uses those principles of game-based learning I mentioned I think you can have a much more powerful experience than if you approached it a different way.   
Because there are also, as well as the opportunities there, there are some, quite a lot of concerns that are often expressed on a general level in the press and so forth about games in general aren’t there, and some parts of it have an ethical dimension to them.  
Yeah of course, yeah, and you know, and that was – I mean I remember those debates when I was in junior high school and when I was in high school, and just getting – and I would, you know, personally when I was twelve, thirteen, fourteen, sixteen years old and I would hear on the news or read articles about how video games were going to make people desensitised to violence or encourage violence or, you know for example; I get really insulted about that because it was, it made me think that people didn’t think that as a young adolescent or, you know, even as a pre-lescent that I didn’t understand the difference, that I couldn’t grasp the concept of real violence versus pretend.  You know, that I couldn’t grapple with these ideas about myself.  That used to drive me nuts and that certainly bled into the way I view games, as an educator, because I think they’re a great tool, I think it’s important to be able to have discussions with kids about the difference and to think about how they’re being used responsibly, but it’s not something that I’m dismissive of, but it’s definitely something that I think can be either overhyped or misinterpreted if you’re, if people just aren’t being responsible about it and aren’t thinking about different ways to jump from, you know, having students play games to think about how we talk about games.  I think it over-simplifies what kids are able to understand and appreciate by just, you know, kind of saying, you know, oh games are bad, or games encourage people to be violent, I think it’s a lot more complicated than that. 
Sure.  And I’ve just put up here some of those key words that have come up in the course of the project, dealing with, well ethics related areas and you mentioned things like violence and [aggressivity 0:58:11], there are a couple of others there that sometimes come up in public domains as well about games and video games. 
Yeah, I think there are games that have been developed, I can’t remember off the top of my head, but it was for some research we were doing for a game with the BGCA, the Boys and Girls Club of America, we helped them develop a game about managing – we helped them develop a game that was going to be used with families who are dealing with reintegration after being in the military.  So, you know, this is something that military families struggle with all the time, you know, how do you go from being away at war for a year, for two years, for not seeing your family, for living life in a particular way and then you come back home, how do you deal with that, so we actually worked with them to develop the game around that idea.  The game was geared more towards the students than, or towards the kids than it was the adults, but it would be something that would give both kids and adults the tools to have that conversation at home with those families.  
In our research we looked at games that work with students on monitoring their aggression, there’s games that are hooked up to students’ heart rates and pulse, so that they can kind of monitor how they feel in certain situations. I think the ideas and the tools for these things are definitely out there and they allow us to explore these ideas in a way that just talking about it, or reading about it, can’t do.  I think that if used responsibly and done well, games or, you know, serious games or playful games that tackle complex ideas like identity and like diversity, like race, can be very, very, very powerful.  Again it has to be done – you know, it’s very important for the curriculum is well thought out, you know, the game can’t just exist on its own and speak for itself, there has to be some unpacking that has to be done.  Or if not within the game itself, there has to be areas for people to think and reflect and to look more deeply than just what’s on the surface, but I think games and playful spaces are great, are the best areas to tackle these complex areas. 
So let’s now move onto an even more general theme, which is games and society, so if you like, broadening the discourse out to the way games are approached or seen at a societal level, be it social change, or cultural change, these sorts of things, how do you see it?
Let me think about that.  Well, I think at some level games are a good reflection of what’s in – games, just like movies, just like any sort of pop culture or for an entertainment level, I think games can be very reflective of what’s important to us as a society.  You know, what do we value, what do we see as important, what’s meaningful for us, games can be a good, you know, games can be a good reflection of that in some level.  I also that games do a great job of bringing people together, you know, so games today literally can bring people, you know, somebody who lives in Boise, Idaho, and connect them to somebody who lives in Beijing, right, and they can exist in these spaces that would never allow people to come together and to participate with one another in some sort of a space, so I think that is a very powerful and very amazing thing that games can do.  
You know, again when we take that concept of bringing people together to, and to play a game like Call of Duty in a space, I think that can be really great and powerful, but I also think, you know, you need to push that idea with experiences that look at things in a more serious way, so when serious games are able to do that and to bring it all together, I think it helps share a language.  I think something that’s also great about games is games do provide people with, with a common language.  The idea of looking at a – I think what games do really well is teach people how to think systemically, so when you look at the different parts of the game you can kind of see how, if you take one part of it away it affects the rest of the game, and I think that’s something that is pretty universal.  
So when I speak to people about, in the Teacher Quest programme that we run, you know, speaking about this in different areas of the world, different cultures find different things to be funny, or interesting, or they may value one game over another, and I think that’s really cool, but one thing that everybody can kind of understand and appreciate is that the game itself as a system and the game itself as a way to motivate and energies people, and I think that’s something that, I never understood that before working at the [anonymised]that, you know, I understood for me personally and for the students I work with that games were very powerful, but to see how important that is to people all over the world, and that, you know, people really embrace these principles that we look at and they really value these things, I think that is something that’s, that’s very important for people. 
Do you see it as, together with that, do you see any sort of more critical areas, or even worrying areas in terms of games in society?
Nothing that especially comes to the top of my head, I mean just from – I’m not a parent, but I know that I would definitely, you know, if I had kids that were playing on games and doing an immersive online experience with people from all over the world, I just would want to know like, you know, who they’re playing with and what’s going on, I mean those are questions that I think, that I obviously think are very, very important.  It’s different from that standpoint, I think that’s definitely important, but I think that, you know I look at it with a very positive point of view.  We teach a course called Teacher Quest online and in person and the great thing about bringing it to the online platform is that I can sit in a virtual room with educators from all over the planet at the same time and we can speak about how we work with students, why – how we can design meaningful experiences for students, and share those ideas in a way that I didn’t get when I was a younger educator, and I love that part about it, you know, it’s not a game that we’re all playing, but just that sort of idea of being able to be in a virtual space and learn from each other and meet people from other cultures, I think the benefits by far outweigh the negatives. 
Let’s just have a look here, now I’m just putting up the key words that have come up in the games and society theme, in terms of cultural change and social change we’ve mentioned in game related innovation I suppose is a type of aggregation in virtual environments sounds like it’s one area of innovation that enthuses you a lot.  You’ve mentioned policy in some cases, in terms of education policy, marketing, does anything come to mind about that?
Not especially, I mean when I look at marketing I just think about, you know, making sure that it gets out to other people but that’s not really a realm that I live in, or give too much thought, you know other than just from the Institute’s point of view. 
Right, good.  Okay now let’s, we’re sort of pretty much, we can start thinking in terms of wrapping up at this point.  Something we ask all the interviewees is if they have any particular suggestions that they would make based on their personal view and experience and so forth for, either for people working in their own field, or even outside other stakeholders if you like in the gaming, games and gamification landscape, what sorts of suggestions, advice or recommendations they would make. 
Yeah, absolutely.  Okay, so let’s see – I think anytime that, from an education point of view, really making – when companies or organisations are designing games to really make sure that student voice and student choice is included when designing games for students, and to really be thinking about how flexibility can be used to one’s advantage.  That’s something that, when we talked about this earlier, that when I would look to bring games into a classroom it was always very frustrating to me when I would see games that were only used in one particular way, and what I really like is when organisations that design games and design experiences for students and for teachers are able to be modified very easily and adapt very easily to any number of settings, so that’s one.  
Another is for policy makers who get interested in things like game-based learning is to not see it as a cookie cutter approach that can be replicated in any area in the exact same way.  You know, school districts, cities, towns, students, teachers, administrators, parents, they’re all different and how something is introduced and used in one area is going to be very different in how it’s used in another area and that is something that the [anonymised]learned very early on.  When we developed Quest to Learn, we developed it with the Department of Education in New York City in mind, and the model that was developed, was developed for teachers like myself and the students that I was teaching in New York City.  But that doesn’t mean you can take that approach and just bring it to Los Angeles or bring it to Doylestown, Pennsylvania, it’s really about thinking about how you’re going to use different techniques for the group that you’re working with, so that part is very important.  
It’s not just designing, it’s not just designing the product, but it’s about how do you bring the process to people, and I think when you empower, I think one thing that an approach like game-like learning can do is it can empower teachers to not just be consumers but to be producers of products, and I think the same applies for students.  You know, how do you get students to be inspired, to create and not just to use.  And I think when games are used very well they can do just that, when they focus on those soft skills I think that’s very important, and I think it can be great. 
Okay, so I’m just putting up the key words here that came up with this suggestion phase, which as you can see are the different stakeholder groups involved I suppose in that, in the gaming landscape and I think you mentioned at various times different things, priorities or areas of critical, or interesting areas for just about all of those groups.  Maybe not so much parents.
For parents it’s – so I think parents, whether it’s game-like learning or not, parents definitely always, parents really need to keep an open mind about education, and this goes with any─  The thing about, here’s the thing about education, is that everybody has a very strong opinion about education more than I think almost any other major institution that exist out there, because everybody has experienced it, everybody has their own deep personal connection to how they were taught, to teachers that they had, to schools that they went to, and some were very positive, some were negative, some were ambivalent, so everybody has an opinion, everybody has an opinion about what works best, how people learn best and it’s different and it’s always something that changes.  
So the parents that are, the best parents that I’ve worked with are the ones that are involved with, are involved and informed with how their kids are learning, but also open to new experiences and that’s not just, and that’s not to say that a parent should send their kid off to any institution and completely trust exactly what’s going to happen, it’s important for parents to have a voice in this process, but to also think about, to also really look and trust new ideas, because how I was taught in the eighties and nineties is different than how people are learning today, and that’s the same for anybody.  
So I think like, I come from a situation where my parents were really valued, they really valued my education, but they also trusted where they were sending me, and the same thing with parents that I work with.  I’ve worked with incredible, incredible, parents at Quest to Learn and at schools beforehand, and I think when the parents were really well-informed about what students were learning and really open to those new ideas and knew how to support but also not be too heavy-handed with their students I think was always very valuable and they’re okay with letting their students learn by failing and making mistakes and tripping up and being challenged and struggling, the kids always had a better experience that way.  
Good.  So now, just, we’re literally wrapping up now, we like to leave a space for yourself to say anything, to add anything you’d like to add about thoughts you’ve had through the interview or things that you think you’d like to say that we haven’t covered, or even comments about the interview itself. 
I don’t think so, no, I mean I’m just, I guess I’m just more interested about the types of, you know you told me a little bit about the types of people you’re talking to and what this, you know, overall what this work is going to inform, so I’m just very interested to kind of hear more about that, or to see what comes of these conversations that you’re having with people and what that is going to be turning into. 
Sure.  Well basically what happens is that, as I mentioned to you, the interviews with the different people within different stakeholder groups are going to be transcribe, they’re going to be analysed, in, let’s say, with an aim to try to have these become part of the different, I think I mentioned to you at the beginning, the different analyses that are being done, both of the literature and of things like policy at European Commission level and so forth.  The aim being then to, if you like, synthesise some of the views, standpoints, some of the positioning’s of these different plays in different parts, on different aspects of games, and then, so basically that will be reported in a deliverable, a project report, which will be coming out in the summer, so obviously we’ll let you know when that comes out so you can see, get an idea of more or less what has been said, sort of opinions and positions that have come up in this interview phase, but also for some of the other phases as well.  
So that will be, like the first port of call if you like, then the output from that is going to be thrown open if you like to, in a number of different ways with some webinars, workshops and so forth to get some reaction on the ground from people who could be say informants of those different groups to get, to springboard back from them what sort of reaction these sorts of positions bring to mind to them, that provoke in them and how they see them. 
And then the final aim, just to summarise it, the final aim being to actually, to draw up some scenarios if you like, some recommendations about perhaps some different avenues that games and gaming, and gamification might be taken forward, both generally in terms of entertainment, games in society and so forth, and also in education.  So that’s just to give you a sort of general idea of what’ll be happening, but as I said the first point where you’ll see some result will be in those, will be in that immediate report about the interviews that we’re conducting and analysing, so you’ll be able to see from that.
Anyway, we’ll keep you definitely informed of the different stages as it goes forward.  It’s due to conclude more or less towards the end of the year, so we should have some tangible outputs from that towards the end of the year in terms of those scenarios and recommendations, which we hope then will feed back into the, the activities that different people are running in terms of games and gamification and hopefully we’ll have something tangible and usable and concrete that will come out of that. 
Cool, all right.  
Okay?  
Yeah.  I hope I was able to give you some good information.  
Ross, you’ve given us heaps of very, very interesting and very valuable information.  That’s going to be a real contribution to how we sort things, issues and topics that will be coming out, particularly the education speak.  
Yeah, so we’ll be in touch and yeah, you mentioned sending a couple of references, the seven principles and stuff like that, yeah that would be great, that would be very helpful. 
Sure, yeah I will link you to those seven principles from IOP and I will send you a link to a few blog posts that we made with a website called Edutopia, so if you wanted to take a look at the game, the map game that I told you about, you know, feel free to take a look. 
Fantastic, okay, and I’ll shoot back if there’s – the reference for the project and obviously the document, the certificate of participation and the activities as well, so I’ll send that off to you pretty soon.
All right, sounds good. 
Okay, so thanks once again and thanks to everyone there, because we sort of went through – I contacted a number of people there and thanks to everyone there at the Institute for collaborating on this, that was really good and the best of luck for the rest of your work, which is, as I said, is always a reference point for us in Europe as well, to know that there are initiatives like your own, dedicated specifically to games in education is very inspiring.  
Absolutely, and same to you guys.  All right, thanks very much, thanks for being able to do this today.  
Great, thanks again, be in touch soon. 
Take care, bye.